Roten Gallery

THE FERDINAND ROTEN GALLERY on Dunster Street has the advantages and disadvantages of a high fashion boutique at Jordan Marsh. Its wares are as approachable as they are bountiful and diverse, while the setting is disarmingly casual and a bit overstuffed.

The Gallery specializes in graphics--original prints of all kinds. It is definitely geared to students and probably has the largest collection of big name original prints at student prices anywhere in the East. The large Roten show which travels around to colleges and small museums every year with great missionary zeal, selling inexpensive originals, is owned and operated by the same group.

The graphic artist you know and love best is almost sure to be represented at the Roten Gallery. Piles of Chagall, Picasso, Matisse, Daumier, Goya, Dufy and Miro are in the collection, often in a series or representing a particular phase or motif. In addition to the modern Europeans are some original Gothic, Persian, modern manuscript pages, and quite a few modern Japanese prints.

Young, relatively unknown artists, distributed over an international spectrum, are spottily picked up by the Gallery. Among the nicest I saw were abstract Japanese prints by Hiroyaka Tajima and weird childish Colombian fanatasies by Silva.

Many of these less known prints sell for more than some inexpensive Picassos but only because of the numbers of editions printed, the size, the demand of the piece. The originals are all 'the real thing,' and worth having, though it is unlikely that your seven dollar Dufy of today will hang in the Jeu de Pomme tomorrow.

The Gallery showroom is stuffed with pictures. Shoulder to shoulder, frame to frame, they overwhelm the viewer as he enters. Yet there is no ex-Cliffie receptionist to threaten you at the door, no sickening plunge into wall-to-wall restraint and exclusiveness like one finds in New York's big galleries. The drawers and drawers of prints are open to anyone. You may shudder at shuffling and bending beautiful Goyas as you look through the stacks of prints. But at least you can see them for yourself with no hassle, look, touch, browse as long as you want--and you might even buy something.